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On Wednesday, OpenAI announced that it will host its first-ever developer conference, OpenAI DevDay, on November 6, 2023, in San Francisco. The one-day event hopes to bring together hundreds of developers to preview new tools and discuss ideas with OpenAI's technical staff.

Launched in November, ChatGPT has driven intense interest in generative AI around the world, including tech investments, talk of regulations, a GPU hardware boom , and the emergence of competitors. OpenAI says in a blog post that since launching its first API in 2020, over 2 million developers now use its models like GPT-3, GPT-4 , DALL-E , and Whisper for a variety of applications, "from integrating smart assistants into existing applications to building entirely new applications and services that weren't possible before."

While OpenAI's DevDay event will mostly take place in person, the keynote and potentially some parts of the conference will be streamed online. "The one-day event will bring hundreds of developers from around the world together with the team at OpenAI to preview new tools and exchange ideas," writes OpenAI. "In-person attendees will also be able to join breakout sessions led by members of OpenAI’s technical staff."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images )

On Wednesday, American attorneys general from all 50 states and four territories sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to establish an expert commission to study how generative AI can be used to exploit children through child sexual abuse material (CSAM). They also call for expanding existing laws against CSAM to explicitly cover AI-generated materials.

"As Attorneys General of our respective States and territories, we have a deep and grave concern for the safety of the children within our respective jurisdictions," the letter reads. "And while Internet crimes against children are already being actively prosecuted, we are concerned that AI is creating a new frontier for abuse that makes such prosecution more difficult."

In particular, open source image synthesis technologies such as Stable Diffusion allow the creation of AI-generated pornography with ease, and a large community has formed around tools and add-ons that enhance this ability. Since these AI models are openly available and often run locally, there are sometimes no guardrails preventing someone from creating sexualized images of children, and that has rung alarm bells among the nation's top prosecutors. (It's worth noting that Midjourney, DALL-E, and Adobe Firefly all have built-in filters that bar the creation of pornographic content.)

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Enlarge / An AI-generated image from an #aicinema still series called "Vinyl Vengeance" by Julie Wieland, created using Midjourney. (credit: Julie Wieland / Midjourney )

Since last year, a group of artists have been using an AI image generator called Midjourney to create still photos of films that don't exist. They call the trend "AI cinema." We spoke to one of its practitioners, Julie Wieland, and asked her about her technique, which she calls "synthography," for synthetic photography.

The origins of “AI cinema” as a still image art form

Last year, image synthesis models like DALL-E 2 , Stable Diffusion , and Midjourney began allowing anyone with a text description (called a "prompt") to generate a still image in many different styles. The technique has been controversial among some artists, but other artists have embraced the new tools and run with them.

While anyone with a prompt can make an AI-generated image, it soon became clear that some people possessed a special talent for finessing these new AI tools to produce better content. As with painting or photography, the human creative spark is still necessary to produce notable results consistently.

Enlarge / "A gaming PC riding a skateboard" as generated by the DALL-E 2-powered Bing Image Creator. The version of DALL-E in the Bing Chat preview may be more advanced. (credit: Bing Image Creator)

Microsoft is giving its work-in-progress Bing AI chatbot the ability to generate images, the company announced today . Bing preview users can generate images by typing "create an image" (or something similar) followed by the prompt. As with other AI-powered image generators, the more detailed a prompt you provide, the more specific and consistent the output is.

Not all Bing preview users will be able to generate images right away, as Microsoft is rolling the feature out in phases (it's not working for me as of this writing). Initially, it will only work in the chatbot's "Creative" mode . The bot has three "personalities," and "Creative" is the most prone to giving wrong answers and inaccurate information.

Microsoft said it was using "an advanced version" of the DALL-E generator without providing additional details. The Bing chatbot was using OpenAI's GPT-4 model several weeks before it was formally announced to the public, so Microsoft could also be using a more powerful pre-release version of the DALL-E model. The image generator Microsoft made available to the public in October uses DALL-E 2.